Hissypats Over This And That Frequently Follow Ephemeral Grat – August 10, 2010
• Monday, July 12 1:14 a.m. If stupidity emitted gravitrons, there’d be a supermassive black hole in the area of L. K. Wood Boulevard and Granite Avenue. For it was there that a driver oh-so-allegedly aimed his mighty vehicle at a fellow mortal of the pedestrian persuasion, this in order to establish the ascendancy of his will over the person who didn’t have a couple of tons of metal at his immediate disposal. As the almost-roadkill called police, the driver hopped out of the car and apologized vehemently, if rather unconvincingly. The driver and someone else there acknowledged that the driver had been piloting the vehicle recklessly, but not trying to run anyone over. So that would mean… the apologies were for not trying to kill the person? “Strongly admonished.”
8:30 a.m. A mobile home park grounds employee reported threats over placement of a “doggie waste” receptacle, apparently accomplished with inadequate dung shui.
9:21 a.m. Streetside entertainment in Valley West included a bushy-bearded man jumping out in front of cars and throwing things at vehicles.
10:31 a.m. A Bayside school reported arduous vandalism involving cement trash barrels overturned and picnic tables somehow relocated to the roof, where clothing had been stapled to solar panels.
12:16 p.m. A man with a lot of personal problems unburdened himself of same with a litany of complaints about this and that, not to mention the other thing. First, he had purchased a bus ticket for June 29 but not used it. When he went to the station this day to use the ticket, he got the bad news that there would be a $15 surcharge. He was told that this was the bus company’s policy, and it wasn’t anything the police could change. Oh, by the way, he added, a female security guard had grabbed his arm at a Uniontown shopping center where he had been panhandling. Told that panhandling is a municipal code violation, he further complained that supermarket personnel had patted him down for stolen property, which upset him. Finally, he said, he wasn’t going to make it to an appointment with his county-appointed conflict counsel at 3 p.m., because he didn’t have a ride. This, he was told, could earn him a bench warrant. Thus, the spiral of somewhat self-inflicted suckiness shows no signs of abating.
12:23 p.m. A vehicle parked in a permit-only area of a G Street parking lot didn’t have one. What it did have was a bunch of notes on it telling it not to park there, all ignored. Police found the vehicle, which didn’t have a complete license plate, and cited it.
12:31 p.m. Some $140 disappeared from a G Street business’s cash register two days previous, and an employee was implicated. Then the money reappeared in the till, but the worker denied wrongdoing.
2:09 p.m. Travelers numbering four to five were embroiled in a shoutfest in the Veterans’ Garden on Eighth Street. Police found two men and warned them about smoking in a prohibited area.
2:17 p.m. Three mid-day drunks were arrested along Tavern row.
3:15 p.m. A very friendly Walker Hound with no tags decided to loll dog-lazily in the middle of Old Arcata Road near a school. A caller was worried about the pooch and stood by as police arrived to pick it up and take it to the shelter.
4:31 p.m. That dog at the yellow house just barks e n d l e s s l y. The owner was advised.
5:20 p.m. Several adults and about five children were reported living in a big yellow truck on J Street, where the grown-ups were loudly arguing. Police got no answer at the truck, but found children running around unsupervised and not necessarily getting a responsible truck-based upbringing.
6:41 p.m. Two girls walking eastbound on Seventh Street threw a soda off the freeway overpass, where it was run over by a car.
6:45 p.m. A mountain biker crashed and broke her collar bone on the new Community Forest trail loop. A ranger opened the forest road to an ambulance and the woman was extracted and taken to the hospital.
7:35 p.m. A boy and his dog, the former actually a drunken man, required official intervention out at the boat basin. Maybe his headband (yes, he was wearing one) was too tight, constricting blood flow to the underutilized inhibition circuitry in his alcohol-basted brainpan, but for whatever reason, the man took to yelling rather more than is customary in a wildlife sanctuary. On arrival, police found and arrested two overly-beveraged gents and took them to jail. The dog was taken into protective custody.
7:44 p.m. A raccoon napped under a tree on Union Street not bothering anyone or looking diseased, so a cop let the sleeping ’coon lie.
8:15 p.m. A “funny rat” was reported in the middle of the roadway in the 300 block of California Avenue. Police couldn’t locate any comedic vermin or other animals.
8:38 p.m. When kids playing ball at a Courtyard Circle apartment complex used a building as a backstop, the man who lived in the apartment on the other side of the wall yelled through the window for them to stop. He then whipped out a cell phone and started dialing. When asked who he was calling, he said “No one.” But it turned out that that “no one” was in fact the police.
• Tuesday, July 13 12:55 a.m. People talked and laughed in Courtyard Circle – loudly, and outside where sleepy apartment dwellers couldn’t not hear them.
2:30 a.m. A traveler was reported bundled in a tarp in the 800 block of 11th Street. He was found and turned out to be wanted on a warrant, and was arrested.
6:28 a.m. A drunken customer at a Heindown Road restaurant got up, walked out the door, peed on the building and then aimed his car down the road.
7:23 a.m. A man on 10th Street agreed not to yell about killing people for the time being.
8:51 a.m. A skunk got caught in a rat trap on 10th Street, and police were called to deal with it. They told the caller to contact a pest removal company.
9:40 a.m. A man working in Benjamin Court in “army pants” let his dog or dogs run around loose. When someone there asked him to tie up the loose pooch (es), he reportedly assaulted the person. Police went and advised him to restrain the dog(s).
12:57 p.m. A caller from the 1000 block of 10th Street observed a man in khaki shorts, a t-shirt and ball cap tackle a man wearing black pants and shirt in front of an office there, then handcuff the man and take him away. The witness became concerned and asked if APD was doing some undercover operation there. It wasn’t, so police looked into the incident and found that an unspecified company’s Loss Prevention department had collared the man in black. They were advised to let police know when they make off-site arrests.
1:16 a.m. A tired woman in the 100 block of Samoa Boulevard dropped something, which broke. An officer swept it up.
1:37 p.m. It was earlier in the day that someone noticed an “older” man with buzz-cut hair staring at naked little boys at a day care center. Now the man was sitting in a car in a parking lot staring at children. An officer verified two things: that no crime had been committed, and that the witness was well and truly “creeped out” by the guy.
3:42 p.m. An uncommonly friendly raccoon was reported at the Marsh. A woman in the parking lot said the cordial ’coon was trying to get into her car, even. The park rangers were arranging relocation for the human-habituated creature with the state Dept. of Fish & Game.
3:55 p.m. A Mohawk-headed alleged LSD salesman wearing army clothing and a “Relay For Life” t-shirt who is known to frequent the Seventh street freeway underpass was reported hawking his hallucinogens on the Plaza. Police couldn’t find the acid-awfulness.
4:44 p.m. A car left parked with two unattended babies in it was gone from the 1000 block of G Street when police arrived.
6:11 p.m. A Giuntoli Lane mobile home park is considered by area residents and businesspeople to be on the skids, and a woman screaming “someone please help me!” with a man’s hands around her neck wasn’t reversing that image. But it turned out to be not as reported, with the argument exclusively verbal in nature as best as police could determine.
9:31 p.m. The trailer park took a further image plummet with the appearance of a naked man having seizures or being combative or both. He was restrained, taken to the hospital and then jail.
9:42 p.m. A tall man in a gray hoodie strolled into a Fourth Street store, scooped up $50 worth of “bottles,” then disappeared into the night.
9:50 p.m. In the alley by the donut shop, a man was said to be “trying to start a gang fight.” Police arrived to find another overamplified verbal argument.
• Wednesday, July 14 12:02 a.m. Slithy toves were spotted peering into vehicles near a Uniontown shopping center. They’d slithered when police arrived and no vehicle depredations were detected.
1:42 a.m. A teenager with bright red marks on his neck said he was attacked by “friends,” the palsy-walsy pummeling having taken place, appropriately enough, on Fickle Hill Road. Police couldn’t find the bruiser boys.
3:53 a.m. A girlfriend became concerned about her boyfriend, from whom she had not heard in more than seven hours. He had fluid around his heart and had been at the ER the day before. Police went to his house and advised him to call his fretting gal.
4:24 a.m. Low-effort campers ensured themselves an aborted night’s sleep by parking their car in Redwood Park, then setting up a tent nearby. They were awakened and sent on their way, such as it was.
4:53 p.m. A four-to-five dog arfing frenzy erupted on Golf Course Road. Police arrived to find a locked yard and left a note, but all was quiet at that point.
7:44 p.m. A man bearing a self-damning backpack and baseball cap roamed a Janes Road mobile home park, arousing residents’ suspicion. He said he was “looking for a friend” (which is probably true for us all in some longer-term sense), but he couldn’t give any relevant details. He went away, but later returned with some dude on a bike.
• Thursday, July 15 7:07 a.m. A “backdoor motion detector” alarm went off at the Pleasure Center. Presumably this doesn’t refer to one of the store’s novelty products.
1:45 p.m. A woman walking down Trail 6 in the Community Forest saw a mountain lion.
3:13 p.m. A mom picking up her little boy at Redwood Park day camp lit into the tot with a loud torrent of scathing verbal abuse, then left in an SUV. Police traced the plate to a Stromberg Avenue address and checked on the kid, who was OK. The mom was advised against using offensive language at the day camp. She said she would be mindful of this.
4:59 p.m. That friendly, friendly raccoon lounged around near the front gate at the Marsh like he owned the place. And even though he did, in a way – it’s a wildlife sanctuary, after all – Fish and Game was poised to relocate the mellow critter.
5:44 p.m. At a Samoa Boulevard apartment complex, a borrowed basketball was retrieved from a child with sufficient force, the kid’s mom said, to break his wrist. An ambulance was summoned to the scene, but the broken wrist turned out to be only bruised. Police went there too, but weren’t compelled to retrieve the ball from its rightful owner, so they left. The woman who took the ball then called to say that the kids had entered her backyard and were heard saying that they were “going to make a plan.” Then the kid’s mom called, saying the ball lady had threatened to “kick her ass.” Police returned and listened to a barrage of claims and counterclaims, all of which negated each other, leaving the whole imbroglio a pointless, entropic fizzle.
• Friday, July 16 9:45 a.m. Another queasy story of a long-haired toothless old man in possession of two small children, with abuse allegedly witnessed in different locations. Nothing immediately verified.
9:59 a.m. The purposeful destruction of a garden by neighbors was allegedly observed on Poplar Drive.
10:27 a.m. A tenant who owes her cohabitant landlady $400 deemed the woman “insane,” listing several symptoms. For example, she told the tenant to put her cat in the microwave, and to sell her computer. Her room is posted as a rental on Craigslist, but moving options are limited. As she told APD, “everything is too expensive.”
10:41 a.m. When two men argue on the street in a business park, and one isn’t wearing a shirt just like the famously lowbrow neanderthals on TV cop shows, it isn’t profiling to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation that things could get all clashy-bashy road-rashy. But any further manly excess in this case isn’t documented.
1:49 p.m. That friendly, not so endearing raccoon at the Marsh tried her hey wassup act again, walking right up to a woman in her car in broad daylight, drooling and doing a minor Cujo maneuver on her. The escalating threat factor scotched plans to relocate the animal, and it was dispatched (see story, left).
2:18 p.m. A little weiner dog was seen inside a sealed car cabin, with only a wing window to attenuate the runaway greenhouse effect. The tubular pooch was panting its cyclindrical little torso off, and a concerned passerby called police. An officer located the owner, who was to be leaving with the steamed weiner shortly.
5:26 p.m. A caller notified APD that she was in a fight with her male cohab, who had a knife in the couch (click). He then scampered, but was tracked down, unless it was someone else who was also wearing camouflage shorts with a skull on the left side and bleeding from the leg due to a glass injury. He was arrested on a charge of spousal abuse.
8:10 p.m. With the residents out of town, a traveler moved onto the front lawn of a South G Street resident, redecorating it with debris. Police shuffled him along.
9:17 p.m. Someone’s ex-hub threatened to come to Arcata and “take care of everybody,” but in the opposite of a caring-sharing nurturing holistic sense.
